Reuters reports that 2 million passwords to accounts of such stalwarts as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Google have been hacked using a server in the Netherlands.
Common passwords included “123456,” “123,” “password,” and “1.”
Three Questions That Arise From This Story
1. How lazy or uncreative do you have to be to have the password “1?” Unless you are a foam finger, you have no excuse. (Foam fingers think everything is #1! It’s not like they can type a complicated series of characters when their finger is too fat to hit anything on the keyboard. It takes a good fifty attempts for them to correctly enter one, after which they declare “This AOL web site is #1!”)
2. What valuable information could a hacker possibly steal from someone whose password is ’1?’ It’s a pretty fair assessment that if your password is that easy, you don’t know how to use your iPhone, where the only things people can steal are photos of your thumbprint blocking a shot, and a contact list that includes the default “Apple” 800 number, and nobody else.
3. What percentage of people entering “password” as their password are being ironic, and what percentage are just confused because they are being told to “enter password?” We’d wager 75% ironic, and they would make fun of us for the latter “enter password” joke for being a totally lame derivative of some similar old-people-don’t-know-how-to-use the internet joke that was so 2002! And while these hipsters were laughing ironically at us, someone would hack into their accounts as totally steal their tickets to the next concert of the National.
